Rushdie

"Rome did not fall because her armies weakened but because Romans forgot what being a Roman meant. Might this new Rome be more provincial than its provinces; might these new Romans have forgotten what and how to value, or had they never known? Were all empires so undeserving or was this one particularly crass? Was nobody in all this bustling endeavor and material plenitude engaged, any longer, on the deep quarry-work of the mind and heart? O Dream-- America, was civilization's quest to end in obesity and trivia, at Roy Rodgers and Planet Hollywood, in USA Today and on E! or on million-dollar-game-show greed or fly-on-the-wall voyeurism; or in the eternal confession both of Ricki and Oprah and Jerry, whose guests murdered each other after the show; or in the sport of gross-out-dumb-and-dumber comedies designed for young people who sat in darkness howling their ignorance at the silver screen; or even at the unattainable tables of Jean-Georges Vongerichter and Alain Ducasse? What of the search for the hidden keys that unlock the doors of exaltation? Who demolished the City on the Hill and put in its place a row of electric chairs, those dealers in death's democracy, where everyone, the innocent, the mentally deficient, the guilty, could come to die side by side? Who paved paradise and put up a parking lot? Who settled for George W. Gush's boredom and Al Bore's gush? Who let Charlton Heston out of his cage and then asked why children were getting shot?"


March 11, 2003